Environmental Journalism as Activism

In this class, we have studied methods for documenting environmental problems and offering insights on the debates surrounding these issues. With a general audience in mind – one that has varying degrees of education and a wide range of political beliefs – we seek to inform audiences about environmental issues while instilling a sense of urgency, or at least sustained curiosity, in our readers. Toward this end, we’ve encouraged writing tactics that are found most often in traditional journalistic writing: we’re told to humanize the subjects we’re covering, no matter their side in the debate, and to avoid vilification in the hopes that we can maintain a tone of objectivity and appeal to the general public. By doing this, we seek to effectively convey the magnitude of an issue without sacrificing our readers’ sense of agency or ownership over the material – we are avoiding alienation at all costs, so that everyone can feel included in the discussion.

This type of journalism is essential in the fight for environmental justice, particularly in a time when corporations feel increasingly entitled to shroud their actions and intentions from the public eye. I think of the dozens of journalists arrested at the Keystone XL and Dakota Access Pipeline protests, whose attempts to document police brutality against peaceful protestors were thwarted by law enforcement officials who had tacitly accepted their role as agents of oil corporations. These journalists were simply hoping to document the political struggle between the inhabitants of a land and the corporations seeking access to it, and to approach that conflict with the same type of objectivity being encouraged in this class: the economic appeal of the pipelines and the jobs which they would generate were not to be ignored in their coverage, but neither was the pipelines’ potential for spillage and the land’s status as sacred grounds for indigenous nations.

In cases such as these, it becomes clear that traditional journalism, even when it attempts at all costs to avoid bias, is an inherently political act, because it strives to turn the general public’s attention towards conflicts of which it might otherwise be unaware; conflicts, importantly, that certain powerful institutions would sometimes like to keep out of the limelight. This is especially true, I think, of environmental journalism, which is almost always problem-oriented, and focuses so frequently on the contamination, wrought by insatiably greedy corporations, of an easily romanticized nature. As a result, so many of these stories inevitably take on a classic allegorical character, equipped with all of the main features of a formulaic Disney movie: the villain who will stop at nothing to get what he wants; the modest, steadfast people who stand in his way; and the pristine landscape and way of life which hangs in the balance are all readily available. Such tales, when captured, are almost inevitably going to be imbued with a strong sense of good-and-evil, right-and-wrong, no matter how objective the journalist attempts to be. This is what has compelled so many environmental writers, such as Rachel Carson, to prominently feature their political beliefs in their writing, even when they might have started on a piece without a political agenda.

I think it’s important to recognize contemporary forms of environmental writing which openly embrace this narrative and take on an explicitly political tone. Naomi Klein is perhaps the most prominent writer of this sort – her work is journalistic, but it does not shy away from its political undertones. She is never afraid to call a spade a spade – with chapter titles like “The Revolutionary Power of Climate Change” and “How Free Market Fundamentalism Helped Overheat the Planet,” Klein is using her journalism as a vessel for an impassioned call to arms. This type of journalism – what might be reduced to “op-eds” by some, and be seen as an inferior form of journalistic writing – is laudable, and I think deserves our attention as aspiring environmental writers. Klein is not only shedding light on what we should be outraged about, she is also telling us who to direct that outrage towards.

            SOURCES:

1.     Tolan, Sandy. “Journalist Faces Charges After Arrest While Covering Dakota Pipeline Protest.” Los Angeles Times, 05 February 2017.

2.     Klein, Naomi. This Changes Everything. Simon & Schuster, 2015.